This invention relates to an encoding and decoding system for digital information having a two-dimensional array of bits and more particularly to an encoding and decoding system including error correcting means to correct errors occurring during the transmission, or recording and reproducing.
In order to correct the burst errors, there have been already known product codes and concatenated codes. The product codes have been unsuitable for increasing the error correcting capability of encoding and decoding systems as will be described hereinafter while the use of concatenated codes has resulted in extremely complicated hardware of the calculation circuits involved as will be also described later.